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Some people can pinpoint the exact moment that inspired their career path. For Dr. Vanessa Kerry, the founder and CEO of Seed Global Health, it was a childhood trip to an impoverished Vietnam. Dr. Kerry was troubled by the inequities in resources and access to health care. After graduating summa cum laude from Yale University, cum laude from Harvard Medical School and earning a master’s in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing from the London School of Economics, Dr. Kerry began her career in global health. As Dr. Kerry completed her clinical work in Uganda and Rwanda she noticed that doctors would provide short-term medical care without contributing to a long-term solution: equipping local doctors with the education necessary to care for the population.

In 2012, Dr. Kerry created the solution she had envisioned. "Seed Global Health helps train a pipeline of future doctors and nurses in partner countries with the idea that they become the future of health leadership," said Dr. Kerry. "These individuals can not only provide care for the population, but they can be advocates and leaders for change in their country, and they can train their successors and their colleagues."

Dr. Kerry helped to establish the Global Health Service Partnership, a public-private collaboration between Seed Global Health, the Peace Corps and the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in 2012. "Seed has sent over 155 faculty volunteers who live for a minimum of a year in the country where they work. We work at 34 sites in five countries now, and we've trained over 10,000 doctors, nurses and midwives over the last four years," explained Dr. Kerry.

Dr. Vanessa Kerry, founder of Seed Global Health.Seed Global Health

Elana Lyn Gross: What inspired you to start Seed Global Health?

Dr. Vanessa Kerry: I grew up in a family of public service and both my parents taught my sister and me that we are part of a greater community to which we should be responsible and in which we should participate. When I was younger, I had an unbelievable experience of going to Vietnam where I was exposed to a whole different way that people lived. There really wasn't an option of walking into an emergency room if you needed it. There was no running water. Kids didn't have shoes. The poverty was really dark, and I was incredibly troubled by it.

So when I went into medicine I knew I needed to reconcile that experience with my career in some capacity. As I worked in global health and did my own clinical work abroad in Uganda and Rwanda, I would see people fly in and fly out to deliver medical care. They would feel good about themselves, but they weren't actually investing in their partners. I really believe that in 2017, everybody, everywhere deserves access to the same standard of care globally and that the gap between two existing standards of care can be closed. So we started Seed Global Health with that idea — that we wanted to invest in the countries where we work and empower our local colleagues to be able to care for the population.

Seed Global Health helps train a pipeline of future doctors and nurses in partner countries with the idea that they become the future of health leadership. These individuals can not only provide care for the population, but they can be advocates and leaders for change in their country, and they can train their successors and their colleagues. Seed has sent over 155 faculty volunteers who live for a minimum of a year in the country where they work. We work at 34 sites in five countries now, and we've trained over 10,000 doctors, nurses and midwives over the last four years.

Gross: You've spoken a lot about there being two standards of care in the world. What you do you mean by that, and how is Seed addressing this dichotomy?

Dr. Kerry: So, there is a stark reality right now that in some parts of the world we have access to unbelievable technology and capabilities to care for a patient. There is an extraordinary capability in parts of the world to deliver outstanding care. For example, if you are diagnosed with strep throat in the United States, you take penicillin — cents on the dollar — and you get better. It becomes an isolated event. If you get diagnosed with strep throat in Sub-Saharan Africa, the odds are you're never going to see a doctor, a nurse or a clinical officer and you're not going to get the treatment you need and instead you could die. A patient needs to able to trust that they can seek care, get the appropriate diagnosis, and they will be able to survive. Those options don't exist right now in many parts of the world, and so we live in a time where 75% of HIV is in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 25% of the global burden of disease is in Sub-Saharan Africa but there's only 3% of the world's healthcare workforce to help address those problems. The imbalances are so great in terms of burden of disease versus the opportunities to address that disease.

At Seed Global Health, we believe we can transform care in these places. I'll give you a story. We have a student physician who was on the wards working with one of our volunteers to learn neonatal resuscitation. Two weeks later, he was walking through another ward with his team, and they passed by a baby that wasn't breathing. And instead of just continuing, he was trained with a protocol and an algorithm, felt for a pulse and realized he could save the child's life. Even in the absence of resources — just empowered by knowledge — he could transform a patient's outcome. He then went on to organize trainings for 200 people at his hospital, became a master trainer and is organizing training around Tanzania now. When you ask him now what he would like to do when he is done with training, he will say he wants to stay in Tanzania and keep teaching others.

Gross: Continuing with the education angle, how did you decide to create a loan debt repayment program for doctors and nurses?

Dr. Kerry: Seed offers loan debt repayment for physicians, nurses and all the volunteers who participate in our program. We did that intentionally because, contrary to popular belief, many health professionals carry debt or may have a monthly mortgage that would deplete them even into their retirement years. We didn't want finances to be a barrier. We see it as a cost of doing business, frankly.

To date, we've helped offset $3.5 million worth of debt over the last four years for about 80% of the volunteers. I think it's been a tremendous contribution in that it allows people to engage in this kind of service. It allows us to recruit the best and brightest without discrimination, and it is an investment in our own health system. We just got the data that says 75% of our former volunteers are engaged in working with underserved populations, underserved specialties or in education in this country. This investment is really important at a time when our own healthcare system is being debated.

They come back as fantastic clinicians. They are also very strong educators because they spent a year teaching.

Gross: How have Seed's efforts been received abroad, and what are some of your proudest moments?

Dr. Kerry: Our efforts have been received very well abroad, and I think that we have really built the trust of our partners over the last four years. We've tried to really honor their voices and their priorities and to think creatively with them about how to solve problems.

One of my favorite stories is about a volunteer working in Uganda. He's a white doctor from San Francisco and he was under the bed fixing a foley catheter. The term for foreigner in East Africa is “mzungu” (or “wazungu” depending on what country you're in).

A tour came through the hospital, and one of the visitors on the tour turns to the guide and says “Who's the mzungu under the bed?” And the tour guide's response was “That's not a mzungu that's Ari, and he's one of us.” I was so struck by that response. That's the greatest compliment you could ever get.

We’ve expanded to new countries at the request of their government, and that is a sound endorsement for us. For example, the 214 Ebola epidemic happened at the scope and scale it did because there were not enough health professionals to help mount the response and the strategy to be able to deal with the disease. That's why the president of Liberia asked us personally to come to Liberia to help her rebuild after Ebola and make sure it never happened again.

Since we started, we have trained thousands of health professionals. We've helped transform critical thinking. We've helped encourage people to stay in the countries rather than leave after they've trained. We've helped improve health outcomes. I think the success has been through the individual victories and stories that the clinicians, our volunteer faculty, share with us. It's about the expansion that we've seen in the countries, which has been an endorsement for the work we're doing. It's about the fact that we've had over 20 requests for partnership in the last year alone, and we just haven't had the funding to be able to capitalize on it. And the whole goal here, for us, is to change the quality of care on the ground for people so that they actually know they have a chance of surviving very, very treatable conditions and diseases.

The goal is to help invest in better health which is critical to economic growth, social cohesion security and global health security.

Gross: What is the best advice that you've received?

Dr. Kerry: One is to be patient. I'm not a patient person, and I feel a great deal of urgency to do something in the world right now. But I’m leading a program that is about generational change. We are going to see the profound impact of our work in five years when we've fully trained somebody who can stay in the country and teach and train. It's a generation that we're trying to shift and grow. It's important to be patient, listen, learn and be iterative, and we strive to do that, but it takes a lot of active energy from me to have that approach.

And I think the other one is to remain optimistic and to continue demanding something different. Our return on investment is going to be seeing the healthier population, a growing middle class, a labor force and better government, things that are going to be seen in five to 10 years. It won’t necessarily turn into a direct return on investment in a financial sense. I feel that some of the biggest social challenges of our time need a different mindset.

We need to be optimistic and really fight to push that social agenda.

Gross: And, what's your best advice for other young professional women?

I am a freelance journalist, Forbes contributor, and student at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. My writing has been published in Fortune, Fast Company, TIME, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, USA Today, Mashable, The Huffington Post, Delish, Glamour, Elle, ...